From The Diary of Nina Fortner
by Aldrae
Summary: I am you, You are me. Spoilers Abound.


Disclaimer: I own nothing here, but borrowing is fun.

Rating: M, to be safe.

Warnings; Spoilers, Incest and UST run rampant. Read at your own risk.

**Authors notes:**

A purely introspective piece, because Episodes 67 and 72 have always greatly interested me. I always wanted to read something about the unusual, borderline telepathic bond between the twins. I never found a fanfic that explored this area. So I decided I might as well write one, something that made some of the more inconvenient implications of having such a bond very clear without going over the top with it. That's my excuse for this, I guess.

Nina, for all her beauty, strikes me as a fairly old fashioned girl… not too old fashioned mind you, but She is the sort of girl I can actually see writing her personal thoughts in a journal before bed. I decided to use that idea to present this story. It had to have a purely introspective feel. I felt the best way to convey something so private was to have Nina write about it… something her brother would certainly never do.

This is a new direction I am going, so please, let me know if you think it actually worked.

This story is set some time after Twins and Apple strudels. It is not exactly a sequel. I just felt that that situation would be the most appropriate for this story. You do not have to read it to get this though.

Forgive the looking glass reference. The silly thing seems stuck in my head.

I have decided to continue The Disciple, since a lot of people seem interested. It does require a lot of research, and a certain frame of mind to write, but I am working on the next chapter. I cannot really say when it will come out, but it should be reasonably soon.

All the best

Aldrae

...

_- Did she ever do anything out of the ordinary?_

_"Well, like I just said, she would speak to herself. It was like she was relating the day's events to the wall. Probably to Johan… or..."_

_- Were you just about to say something?_

_"Yes, but... well, it's just too outlandish to be... Anna would often tell me, 'Johan learned about this today,' or 'Johan met this person,' but I thought she was just imagining that. But there was one night, she said, 'Tomorrow, Johan's going to leave his orphanage'... And the next day, Kinderheim 511 burned down, and only Johan and another boy made it out alive... I think it was just a coincidence, though."_

_Erna Tietze 'Another Monster',_

From the journal of Nina Fortner

April 6

My experience has taught me that innocence exists to be inevitably corrupted. Life itself seems to have an unbearably powerful grudge against it. Even the most quiet, peaceful human lives eventually breed stagnation; then follows decay and then the inevitable end… destruction. It is nobody's destiny to remain naïve and innocent forever.

My Brother and I have never really been innocent. This is the truth.

He tried to protect me, ignoring the putrefaction spreading across own soul in order to save mine.

He should not have wasted his time.

A part of me is the same as he is. It has been that way, from the start.

I have never really been only myself.

It makes me sound insane, doesn't it?

I am brave enough to admit it. I am quite mad, you see. We both are.

Mine is a banked, tranquil sort of insanity, carefully suppressed, sealed up and hidden away in the depths of my subconscious mind. I hold on to a semblance of sanity, but the madness is there, make no mistake. People think I am the good, well balanced, innocent, practically angelic twin. It makes me laugh sometimes… about as often as it makes me cry.

I wish I was the woman they all seem to see. But I will not lie. I am not. I only pretend to be.

I know it. He knows it.

He knows I am not that sweet, harmless little girl that people see.

He knows because he sees her, living in me. He sees her murderous, deadly insanity, smells the rotting sickness in her the way only another sick person can.

My brother is a combination of both parts of me. His madness is both mine and hers.

We are the same… in so many terrible ways.

The only difference between the two of us is that my brother does not lie to himself. He accepts what he is, but I cannot.

I cannot accept_ her_.

She exists, inside me, as well and as strongly as He does. I am not sure when she was born. Sometimes I think I have always had her. At other times it occurs to me that she must have been born there; in the mansion of red roses; conceived in the soft, formless, womblike darkness of the padded room, and born in the outpouring of poison and blood, of fear and death and spilled wine.

I hate her; as intensely and illogically as only a mad woman can hate.

Or rather, more honestly, she frightens me.

Especially now…

She was quiet before. She barely existed in those days, long ago, when I was the busy but carefree almost innocent daughter of the Fortners. She slept quietly in the days that I had forgotten my brother, awakening only occasionally to torment me in hazy, barely understood nightmares.

I never let anyone see her. Since I became an adult; or more accurately, since I _remembered_, I have been very careful. Dr Gillen pulled her out once; but no one else has since.

She is always there. Even when I pretend that she is not

He talks to her sometimes. I hear them both converse inside my head. It would be annoying enough to drive me mad if I was not insane already.

In my earliest memories, there was very little separation between my thoughts and his. When I wanted to, I could actually see through his eyes almost as well as I could see though mine. I could clearly describe the faces of people he was seeing, even when we lived in separate orphanages. When he let me, I could hear the voices of the people he talked to. It was while he was there I found out that he could actually hide some of his thoughts from me. He has always had his secrets. But I was never too curious about them, because I knew my brother. I knew those secrets were things that would hurt.

When we were together as very young children whose minds were completely open to each other, we often had long conversations without uttering a single word.

I have forgotten how to do that now.

My brother, apparently, has not.

He keeps reaching out to me. He wants that contact. I can feel his longing for the sweetly seamless, easy unity we used to have as children. The bridge between us now cannot satisfy his desire for the semi-infinite union we shared then. In a way, I can understand his yearning. I have felt the depths of his emptiness. The parts if his mind I once shared are empty, hungry and gaping. I have felt that hollow, gaping emptiness myself. I know the ache that only people as close as we used to be can feel when driven apart. It is far worse than the deepest sting of loneliness. I survived it because I was angry with him. I forced away all my memories of him. And I had people who loved me to help me forget that the painful void was still there.

He never got used to it.

He wants me back inside him, He wants me to let him inside me. I cannot control the way these things work. If I could, I would not allow it.

If only I could.

It frightens me. Our mental amalgamation did us little good in the past. I shared a burden with him that I should have been mine alone.

But he would not allow it. He took it away from me.

And… childishly unaware of how much he loved me, and how much carrying such a burden would inevitably destroy him… I let him take it from me and carry it alone. I remained the 'innocent', playful, happy one. He was a child, my brother; but he was no longer innocent. I was one of those who stripped the child my brother was of the first shreds of true innocence that he had.

It sounds like my guilt talking, doesn't it? It may be, but as a grown woman, there are things I understand now. Things I never saw when I was that traumatized little girl.

I remember telling him the story, day after day; relentlessly pushing my fear and horror inside him, over and over and over again. He listened as he unzipped my bloodstained pink dress to clean and dress my wound. He listened as he threw together some food and made me eat. He listened as he lay beside me in mother's bed, night after night, lights blazing because I could not stand the shadows, even though he liked to sleep in the dark, holding me close when the fear was too much for me to bear, or when the tears would not stop. I talked and talked for day and days, purging myself of the memories. I brought my fear and horror into the unsullied peaceful sanctuary we mentally shared, because I did not know what else to do with them. He saw the things that I had seen, even as I described them. He felt the things I felt and could not describe. My brother willingly swallowed my contaminated memories up as rapidly as I regurgitated them. He absorbed the fear that possessed me even as I exuded it. He took my gruesome, mercilessly relentless nightmares inside himself over and over again until they tore his mind apart. When it was over, and I was clean, I could finally look up at him and smile. I was cured, the seemingly innocent one again, but his innocence was well and truly gone.

Strange, isn't it? That such a quietly brutal, relentless act of rape could be considered harmless just because it was unintentional.

And yet, he loved me. He adores me even now, in the very depths of his madness.

What a horrible, strangely pathetic cliché; so desperately adoring your own rapist.

I never meant to do it. I honestly had no idea.

And he loved me too much to tell me to stop or to let me know how much I was unwittingly hurting him. I remember how calm he was. How his face remained expressionless as he listened. He let my words hurt him because he felt he deserved it. He had not protected me. He had been at home, safe, while I had been taken away and made to suffer.

It was an act of penance, a terrible but deliberate act of self flagellation.

I think it was at that time that he also began to separate his thoughts from mine. He did not want me to see what I had done to him. He has always had a frighteningly powerful desire to protect me. I wonder what it did to the little boy he was, knowing that he couldn't, and then so vividly experiencing the awful things that had happened to me while I was away, trapped in a place where he was impotent to protect me.

Older Brother despises helplessness in himself. He always has. He hates it more than anything else.

I have always thought it was a terrible thing to combine the mental awareness and passions of an intelligent adult with the emotional fragility and physical limitations of a child.

It certainly did my brother no good. Even now, he still cannot fully accept that those memories are not his, but mine.

They have hurt him far more than they ever hurt me.

Strange, isn't it; How horribly melodramatic this all sounds?

But melodrama or no, the truth is that I had my brother to run to. I had him to help me get past the nightmare of the Red Rose Mansion. His arms may have been small, but they were strong enough to pull me away from the darkness. He had no one. Not even me. He was always very strong in the eyes of the child I was. It never occurred to me to consider how psychologically fragile he might have been, and he loved me too much to let me see it. I did not know that he had become a victim of the very same darkness he saved me from. I could not see his need until we were both adults, and he was almost irretrievably broken.

My friends all tell me that this is not true. It was not my fault. I was a child. They say he was capable of making his decisions, that no matter what, he should never have done the things he did.

They tell me that there is no excuse for murder.

They are correct. I have to admit it. The good girl that Mrs. Fortner raised certainly agrees with them; the good girl who remembered nothing of her past, the good girl who was terrified of her evil, mass murdering twin, the good girl who would not remember how much he loved her, the good girl who wanted to kill herself when her guilt set in, because she could not live with the knowledge that she had played a significant role in creating the monster that her brother had become, the good girl who could neither see with her Brother's eyes, nor feel her brother's pain.

I am no longer that girl.

I know the full extent of his sins. But I cannot hate him, or turn my back on him, no matter how terrible they are. Perhaps this makes me just as twisted as he is, but I do not really care. He is my brother. I can no longer allow myself the luxury of forgetfulness, nor can I afford the peacefully false sumptuousness of self deceit.

The woman I am now looks back. She sees the terrified, sweaty, bleeding child that I was. She sees the brother of that little girl, sitting in a pink dress on the hard wooden floor for days on end; waiting for the door to open, waiting for his sister to find her way home.

He knew mother was not coming back. She had told… me? Him? Us?I cannot remember who she said the words to. It does not matter. We both knew.

I was the one he was waiting for.

I wonder how often he ate. I know for a fact that he probably did not sleep. As picky as he usually was about personal hygiene, he wore that little pink dress for days. He made no attempt to change it in all the time I had gone. He just sat there and waited for me, with only that wretched book as company.

I cannot imagine how much that hurt my brother; the waiting, the inability to do anything but wait, the fear that the door would not open, that it would never open. That I would never return… or that I would no longer be myself if I ever did.

It is strange; I remember feeling it sometimes, but not understanding. I felt his fear as deeply as my own as I stumbled about inside the dark, padded room. I had not yet learned to separate my thoughts from his own. I had no idea how abnormal it was to share the things I thought with him.

He never could hide much from me for too long.

Except those secrets he guarded. Except his quiet, out of the way murders.

I could never really see the things he did not want me to see.

In retrospect, I think a part of me might have felt what he was doing. I sensed something at times, but I did not dare allow myself to examine what I was feeling. I was too afraid to face my suspicion that something was terribly wrong. I suspected he wore a mask in front of me, but I did not wish to rip it off his face. I was too terrified of what I would find underneath.

I was right to be afraid.

I suppose this is why I was more hurt than shocked the night that I found out the truth. I was wounded and angry enough to pull the trigger of the gun he placed in my hands. I wonder at those feelings now, at how I could actually bring myself to shoot the brother I loved so much. As a grown woman faced with the same choice, I could not do it. Even then it took far too much from me. It is true he told me to, but I did not have to obey him. I realize that now. I wonder what would have happened if I had flung the gun away and yelled out my anger at him. Perhaps things might have been better if I had adamantly refused to do what he so clearly believed I wanted to do.

Or perhaps we would both be dead.

The past is what it is. I cannot change it. The present concerns me more; this blurring of the lines between myself and him.

I wish I could stop it, but there are things I cannot control.

We are becoming closer, and the barriers are breaking. Sometimes he hears my thoughts, and I hear his. He sees my dreams, and I see his.

It is happening more and more frequently.

He often says, usually with the most devilish smile I have ever seen, that he likes my dreams far better than his own.

It is not unusual for identical twins to have some sort of bond, but we are not identical, no matter how alike we look. This sort of thing is rare in our case, and ours is abnormally strong. And I have learned, to my dismay, that proximity only makes it stronger.

Sometimes I wish it died before we chose to forgive each other.

But I doubt it can die. I cannot pretend to understand how these things work. I only wish my own thoughts were fully my own again, and his were fully his… or, at least, that I could control the ebb and flow of his thoughts from my own. I was used to being my own person, I enjoyed the luxury of being my own separate, individual self.

But the lines are blurring. The boundary that separated me from him is fading. Our bond is almost as strong as it was when we were very young and had no idea how odd it was to run around in each other's dreams. He still sees the two of us as the same. He calls me his other half to this day. I am not much better. My perception of myself as an individual grows hazier the longer I stay with him. I can barely tell which dreams are mine and which are his anymore. Few differences exist between the two.

His dreams are rarely pleasant.

Except for those…

We are no longer children. I honestly wish he could keep those dreams inside his head where they belong. I understand that it is perfectly normal for men to have them, but that does not mean I have to share them.

He has some of the weirdest and most dangerous kinks imaginable. Frankly, some of them worry me.

If I catch that brother of mine anywhere near a noose...

I cannot help but conclude that secretly, in his own quietly civilized way, he might be nursing the potential to become the worst sort of licentious degenerate imaginable.

Hardly surprising, all things considered.

But I have to confess, not all of his dreams are that strange. They are many, and varied. The scenarios change as consistently as the trappings of each dream. His fantasies are many, and varied. The dreams themselves are not terrifying. The worst of them are at most, bizarre. But enough of them are the sort of dreams any biologically normal, sexually aware young man would have.

Only one thing about them remains constant.

The woman he dreams of.

I have seen her so many times; sweaty and flushed, naked and wanton, sprawled underneath him with her long, slender legs locked about his hips, moving with him slowly, or raking her nails across his back, tearing his pale skin as she mewls sensually, moving with him as he relentlessly pounds her into the mattress with the enthusiastic fervor of a ravenous beast. I have seen her on top of him, breasts flattened against his chest, rocking her hips against his, repeatedly engulfing his flesh with her own, or on hands and knees in front of him, offering herself to him, taking him in her hands, in her mouth, turning around to let him take her from behind. I have watched them in bed, over tables, in the bath, in semi public places, anywhere, everywhere. Sometimes their coupling is slow, loving, gentle, and sweet. Sometimes it is rough, bordering on animalistic in its intense brutality. A lot of the time there is no sex at all, just him and her together, doing the odd, random, quotidian things that couples do.

No matter what happens in those dreams, it is always the same woman.

It is always me.

He dreams about me almost as much as he dreams about bloodstained monsters with red roses, and as often as he relives the nightmares of Kinderheim, or drowns himself in a sea of cold, pale, eerily smiling faces with blank, undead eyes. He dreams of me as often as he dreams of walking alone, trapped in the dreary landscape of the end, that cold, windy, barren place that it took me so long to finally see.

He does not care that I know. He wants me to see his dreams. I am sure he knows how to hide them. He just does not bother to.

Neither does he hide himself from the knowledge of who I am in those dreams. I am recognizably myself, unconcealed by shadows. My faults, my flaws, my weaknesses, he sees them all. I have seen them though his eyes. It constantly amazes me how well he knows me. It amazes me more that my flaws do not bother him in the least. They do nothing to diminish the person I am to him.

It is uncanny, seeing myself the way he sees me, and actively _feeling_ the dizzying mixture of intense lust and almost crippling love he feels for me.

He does not talk about these things. He does not have to. Our proximity does his work for him. His methods of persuasion are far more effective than words can ever be. He does not need to say he loves me. He does not need to tell me he wants me. I know he does. I have felt his carefully restrained, but almost rabidly desperate desire as if my own body possessed his hunger. I have felt his lust, wild and unleashed in his dreams, where it can roam, free to hunt and devour at will.

In those dreams, I am myself, but I am also him, I feel his need and his pleasure as strongly as I feel my own. He is seducing me. I know it. And the worst thing about it is that I cannot do anything to stop it. I am falling deeper and deeper. The monster overwhelms me, and I feel myself gradually submit.

I wake up, on those nights, sweaty and panting, wet and throbbing; trembling with an unbearable ache that barely allows me to breathe. Somehow I know he is awake in the adjoining room. Knowing this makes everything so much worse. I feel every wrinkle in the bedclothes underneath me. I shudder as the comforter brushes against my skin. My nipples are engorged; sensitive to the point of pain. The shameless craving my own body feels is enough to drive me mad.

On those nights, I hate him almost as much as I want him.

But I cannot judge him. I grow as perverse as he with every dream we share.

I want him almost as desperately as he has always wanted me.

And knowing this does not disgust me.

It should, but it doesn't.

I think this is what frightens me the most about it. If I am truly the good, normal girl Mother… Mrs. Fortner… brought me up to be, I would be disgusted by it. Or at the very least, it would embarrass me and make me feel awkward or uncomfortable and ashamed around him. I would not feel any trace of this perverse… excitement.

But I am not that good girl.

Not anymore.

In fact, these days, my own dreams are little better than his.

It is mortifying to think that he has probably seen them. The only thing that consoles me is the fact that I never see the face of the man in my dreams.

Perhaps because I do not want to see.

I wake up after those dreams, and try to convince myself that it was Tenma, or Dr Gillen, Mr. Lipsky, or even some random, extremely attractive man I saw on TV.

And my brother's gaze after each dream is intense; his smile is sad, indulgent, patient and almost pitying.

I hate that smile, but as much as I hate it, I cannot pretend to be as brazenly honest as my brother.

His gaze makes me feel uneasy… trapped… naked, angry and aroused all at once. I try, very hard, to retain the dregs of sanity that Nina Fortner once had. One mentally deranged twin is more than enough. The two of us cannot afford to be simultaneously insane.

But it is almost impossible to claim any sanity when sharing mental space with him…

I have to be strong. In the twisted world where we grew up, he sacrificed his soul to preserve my own. What little humanity I have left is his as well. It is my duty to hold on to it for both our sakes. It is the lifeline that will eventually save us both.

But there are those times when the madness thrums in my blood like the wine he pours in my glass at dinner, watching me with his terrifyingly seductive smile.

I am drunk, but not with the wine.

It is shameful, twisted, depraved. This lust…

He can walk into this room, right now, as I write this. He can bend me over my writing desk and shove himself deep inside me without a word, and I will do absolutely nothing to stop him… even though I know I should… even though I know how many things such an act could inevitably destroy.

I want him to do it.

I am not particularly religious, but I am very sure that if there is a devil that sits on my shoulder, gleefully whispering temptations in my ear, it has got my brother's face.

I see him, my brother, my monster, my attendant demon, the unrepentantly insistent devil wearing his most handsome, enticing smile; hand outstretched, patiently waiting for me.

He is silent, because he has no need to speak.

"_Take my hand, Darling. Walk with me. Come with me to the looking glass world where no restrictions exist and nothing really matters. I can be mad, you can be mad. The two of us can be deliciously insane together." _

It is only a matter of time.

I should never have taken him up on his offer to move in. It was a very foolish decision on my part.

Not that he gave me a real choice, but still…

Still…

I cannot help but laugh at the irony. I am here, lost in a psychedelic whirlpool where nothing makes sense. And Nina, the good girl, is slowly drowning, lost in the eddies of her monster's terrible desire.

And even though I strive to cling to the last remaining bits of my sanity, the monster inside me that I try to restrain wishes the good girl would just disappear.

I am afraid; terribly, terribly frightened; of my brother, but more of myself.

I wish Tenma was here…

...

All done. Hope you liked.

Please review? Feedback inspires me to write more. It also makes me improve.


End file.
